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You're not a business guy. Not at all. But your clients are. They absolutely are; you can tell by the immaculate lines of their suits, their pristine timepieces counting down each second, their air of impatience at the thought that any of those seconds might be wasted, because time is money! You, you're a pilot, and your job (it's not a business, you understand) is to get them to their destination in time for the big meeting! The business guys come to you because you fly a bi-plane, and who has time for airport security, for waiting for a plane to be fully boarded, for putting on a seatbelt, when there are business deals to close? Why wait, when you can just hop on the wings and take off? Time is Money!

Time may not be money for me, but it is somewhat short this Wizard Jam. When I made Dot Gobbler I was able to work on it full-time, but now I have a day job and I'm going to be away from the 30th of November, so I'm going to have to submit on the 29th. As such I've had to find something quite a bit smaller in scale. A game where you fly a bi-plane with business guys balanced on the wings seems like something I can probably get working in that amount of time. We'll see! The lovely 5 of 6 has agreed to supply the music again, so that's good.

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May as well post my first day's progress. Not a lot, really, just made a start on my business guy model:

Still needs a lot of work on the face and feet. I did initially think about about making the business guys a fixed, static mesh in either a sitting pose or standing pose, so if they fell over it would look weird and dumb, but then I thought about maybe trying to get ragdoll physics working, finally. I'm not going to make the model super-detailed, so I'm hoping that I'll finish it off and rig it tomorrow. Ideally I want them to be in a mostly rigid pose when sitting on the plane, but with a small amount of give. If they fall off, then they can go full ragdoll.

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I've tidied him up considerably, but Dibs liked this, so this is my update for today.

Boy, I'd forgotten how long it takes to model, texture and rig a full character. What was I thinking? On the plus side, I'm getting a little help with the systems stuff from my friend Jamie, who I imagine will check into the thread at some point.

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No detail on the face yet, just wanted to get the basic colours down to see how it looked in Unreal. Skin is way too pale, obviously, but I'll sort that out. I ideally want to do three different skin tones, and a Business Gal mesh, for maximum inclusiveness, but that's going to depend on time constraints. And because women are too hard to model!

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On the subject of music, I was asking around in the WizJam Slack, and figured I'd post the request here too: Is there anyone who can play (and record themselves playing) saxophone, who would be capable of recording a kind of insane freestyle sax solo (I'm thinking along the lines of this, by Boom Boom Satellites [I know that's a trumpet!]) for the in-game music above? It's a long shot, but I thought I'd ask! Let me or Shoes know if you're interested.

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So I've spent the last few days banging my head against Unreal Engine 4's physics assets, trying to get ragdolls working. I've come to the conclusion that the way I've learned to rig characters, although it works for animation, is fundamentally flawed for physics simulations:

I used Mixamo to rig the model, and this is the result:

Much better! The torso issue is weird, but I'm hoping that's just because Unreal didn't auto-generate a constraint to hold the two parts together. So yeah, I'm way behind at this point but now that I've got my Business Guy almost working, I can go about setting up the flight mechanics and the system to deal with keeping the guys on your wings.

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I've had a couple of days of radio silence because I didn't get a huge amount done yesterday (I attached two guys to the lower wings, but they were intersecting with the upper wings, so their physics were freaking out). I spent today getting the ragdolls working properly, though, so this is where I am at the moment:

Really happy with how that looks. I've got partial physics working, so the plan is for the guys to be in a fixed pose on the wings, but with varying levels of physics affecting their upper body, so that as you turn the plane, they should react in a convincing way. Should.

Maybe I'll get some actual gameplay done tomorrow!

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You know it's a nice gif, when you can't look at it without thinking about potential sound effects! Also, that looks kind of like the world's worst Shoryuken! (as in how effective it would be, probably gives your opponent the invincibility frames).

ps. I really hope you're able to find/make/include the freestyle sax solo.

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I didn't really get any gameplay done today. I thought I'd model the plane, expecting to spend a couple of hours on it, and I think it took me about 6 hours in total. It looks nice though!

I got that in game, with the flying template (Didn't want to have to implement flight from scratch, although the template is pretty rudimentary and is going to require a number of tweaks), attached my Business Guys to it, and this happened:

I've got two days left, and I still haven't built any of the systems! I think I may have to add a few things when I get back from holiday. Tomorrow I'm going to quickly model a runway and a ring, so that there's a start point and an end point, and something for you to fly through for points, and then I'm going to frantically try to implement a system for determining when the guys will fall off. Still need to do some work on the landscape too. I'd like to make a better texture, with proper heightmap stuff, but I'm afraid it's probably just going to be grass. I'll put some hills in, at least, and maybe some water.

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Disaster has struck! Obviously I didn't get the game into any decent state before leaving for my holiday, but I was planning to at least put something on Itch.io and update it after the deadline. I have a plane that you can fly around, and the business guys will fall off one by one if you fly too erratically, but there's little else there. However, when I tried to package the game this morning, Unreal gave me a fatal error, and because I hadn't even started packing at that point, I didn't have time to figure out what was going wrong.

So, I'd planned to finish it off when I get back on the 7th anyway, but now you won't be able play it until then. Sorry about that! At the same time I'm kind of glad that people won't see my unfinished mess. If the last Wizard Jam taught me anything, it's that people who record videos of your game will often download the very first release as soon as it goes up and then not update it.

So yeah, I'm looking forward to finishing up, and to playing everyone else's stuff!

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I'm still working on this! Since I got back from holiday I've been working on getting all of the major game systems in place, and it's shaping up. I'd hoped to have something worth uploading by the end of tomorrow, so I'll see how that goes. For the time being, here's the title screen, with T-poses filling in for actual poses which I may or may not have time to make:

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Okay, I've uploaded a build! Sorry it's so later, but after I got back from holiday I thought about pushing something out sooner rather than later, and then I decided I'd like to make a half-decent first impression, and patch in the nicer stuff. That being said, the list of 'nicer stuff' is a pretty long one...

A Litany of Regrets

The business guys don't have eyes or lips...

I didn't get to make specific poses for the title screen.

There's no collision around the runway, so if you don't take off, you can keep driving along the ground.

No sound effects for the plane's engine, flying through a ring, or exploding.

No particle effects for rings or explosions either.

The Guy voices are mixed like crap. Need to either make these sound better, or rerecord them.

Not enough scenery, or rings to fly through!

The Guys do weird arm-popping when they flop about, and I never managed to fix this.

I wanted to have a couple of different texture variations for both the plane and the Guys.

Man, I even wanted to have other planes flying around, but that seems like something for a much later version.